Born to Jewish parents who emigrated to South Africa in the wake of the Holocaust, Gary is a perpetual outsider—a privileged white child in a society stratified by racism and a marginalized Jew in a world still permeated by anti-Semitism. Driven abroad by a troubled home life, Gary increasingly finds himself drawn to the newly popular strains of Eastern mysticism taking root in North America. Across decades of practice, he discovers (and builds) a space for himself and his community in a skeptical, challenging world.
Beginning with the author Michael Shandler’s childhood in 1940s Cape Town, KARMA & KISMET chronicles a fascinating journey of personal growth through an incredible series of historical moments. Although this journey is specific—raised Jewish in South Africa post-World War II, zipping through recently formed Israel and over to Vancouver, finally dipping into the United States and landing in Massachusetts—readers might be surprised by how relevant the historical and thematic content continues to be. With anti-Semitism on the rise and Israel’s war in Gaza ongoing, KARMA & KISMET provides valuable recollections of the very real danger of being Jewish even after the defeat of the Nazis, and the pervasive, casual anti-Semitism which continued to flourish. Cultural practices like yoga, or even vegetarianism and veganism, are now broadly popular in the United States; so it’s easy to forget that these ideas entered American cultural consciousness through a spiritual complex similarly perceived as destructive, associated with low morals, drug use, and Marxist-shaded practices of collectivism. Shandler’s personal journey is surprising, sprightly, and accessible—powerfully evoking the feelings of these historic moments and developments.
It would be easy for this broad, complex journey to feel remote or unrelatable, but KARMA & KISMET is ably told. The use of the present tense neatly skips over any sense of historical distance. The narration is particularly immediate in moments of real or implied violence, like the rumination on a boarding-school principal’s office—where an umbrella stand is filled with bamboo canes for corporal punishment. The prose itself is straightforward and frank, often employing short, parallel simple sentences. But this allows the descriptive language to shine even more brilliantly when it is deployed. KARMA & KISMET uses some evocative animal metaphors in particular: a son follows his abusive father “like an overeager puppy desperate for a walk with his master,” while eighteen-year-old army draftees, with their fresh buzz-cuts, stand for inspection like “plucked chickens.” The text also has an eye for scenic detail, sometimes striking in one blow (Vancouver encapsulated in “charcoal skies and relentless rain”), sometimes unravelling over a series of visually rich clauses (“in the moonlight, tall vines laden with huge bunches of ripe grapes provide a feast for hungry eyes”). This effective balance allows the prose to support (but never overwhelm or obscure) the narrative itself.
Connecting broad swaths of time and space with frank, intimate prose, KARMA & KISMET is the rare spiritual memoir that is also deeply and affectingly human.
Told with the thoughtful reflectiveness of a practiced yogi but with persistent emotional immediacy, Michael Shandler’s KARMA & KISMET is an excellent memoir of both the author’s personal journey and the astonishing turbulence of global culture following WWII.
~Dan Accardi for IndieReader